Hello everyone. As you will very well have noticed, I haven’t posted anything here on my blog in nearly two months. Well, as you may have guessed, I hit a bit of a creative brick wall and couldn’t really think of anything to write that would interest everyone. So, I have decided that from now on I will write just what I want without really aiming at any particular audience. Whatever I feel like writing about in terms of films (and perhaps even music every now and again), I shall write. So without further ado, here’s my newest blog post.
Steve McQueen’s Hunger. I wrote a review of it back in July but even then I wasn’t doing it proper justice. It is one of the best films I have ever seen, and it features some of the most incredible, mindblowing direction from a man who was then relatively new to making films: Steve McQueen. Hunger was only his first feature, yet it has the skill and raw power instilled in each image of the more accomplished, later Kubrick films. It is a stunning, engrossing movie I could watch over and over and it is deservingly one of my twenty favorite films of all time.
But I’ve already reviewed it, so what’s left to give you? Images. Here are images from the film Hunger that for me, sum up McQueen’s greatness and directorial perfection. And there are many of them.
- The focus on individual actions and body parts, reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent and Robert Bresson’s L’Argent, and a powerful distancing technique that separates the viewer from the “whole” by concentrating on the details. All these images are from the first few minutes of the movie.
- The focus and framing of faces. Very powerful and evocative.
- The framing of distant characters overwhelmed by their surroundings, trapped into them.
- Dark, grungy colours, used to great effect.
- Symmetry; images that are symmetrical to varying degrees. Recurring and startling.
- General striking imagery, recurring throughout the movie.
And finally, as good a place to conclude this post as any, here is one of the most important scenes in the movie, a segment from the long conversation between Michael Fassbender’s character and a priest, that showcases Fassbender’s incredible talent and McQueen’s directorial skill in framing him and soaking up every single ounce of power in the image and dialog. Absolutely stunning.
